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Couple Linda Bouchard’s vision and sound with poet Anne Carson’s texts, engage the talents of a host of collaborators, including extraordinary musicians Guy Few, Joseph Petric, and Eric Vaillancourt, give it all several years to cook, move, splinter, and coalesce, and you have Bouchard’s multimedia performance piece Murderous Little World. There’s a three-minute promotional trailer for this piece that offers a collage of loosely linked visual and aural sensations: clouds, playing cards, a woman’s enigmatic smile, flung words, frenetic piano notes, wild trombone riffs, a choir. It is like a vision of contemporary life, startlingly overwhelming and by turns smooth and lyrical. I asked Bouchard to give me a walking tour of her Murderous Little World.
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Image: Courtesy of the artist
Richard Simas is a freelance writer with a background in literature and the performing arts, in particular contemporary music. He lives in Montreal and contributes regularly to contemporary arts and literary reviews. A winner of Portugal’s Camoes Institute prize, he is currently working on a dossier on contemporary Portuguese writers. His work has been published in Europe and in North America, including the Journey Prize anthology and a winner of a Fiddlehead Fiction Prize. He is a frequent collaborator with Musicworks.